Zanzibar

Description

'A fascinating read: Wilbur Smith meets William Boyd in the warm seas and spice-scented air of Zanzibar' New Statesman 'A riveting thriller' Observer The year is 1998. Nick, a marine biologist, is working on coral reef protection off the idyllic island of Zanzibar. While on a trip to mainland Tanzania, he meets Miranda, who works in the US embassy there. As romance blooms, the couple could be forgiven for thinking they are living in paradise - until they find themselves embroiled in a desperate terrorist conspiracy. From the bestselling author of the LAST KING OF SCOTLAND

Giles Foden was born in 1967 and spent much of his early life in Africa. For ten years, he was an editor and writer for the Times Literary Supplement and the Guardian, and his work has since been published in Granta, Vogue, Esquire, The New York Times and Conde Nast Traveller, where he is a contributing editor. His fiction includes THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND, ZANZIBAR, TURBULENCE and FREIGHT DOGS. THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND was made into an Oscar-winning feature film in 2006.

His sense of place is unerring, his details exact, felicitous, often rising to the luminosity of poetry - whether he is writing of coral reefs, or clove farms, or the markets of Zanzibar and Pemba. There is no trace of colonial, condescending or Orientalist attitudes in his writing -- Neel Mukherjee * The Times * A rewarding, intelligent novel that displays his now characteristic blend of experience, imagination and intimate research -- Henry Hitchings * Financial Times * [Foden] is a master of ambiguity where it is welcome, and discomfort where it is not. Above all, he knows how to use individual lives to dramatise and explain external events that impact on us all -- Anthony Holden * Observer * [Foden's] fiction is so convincing that it is hard not to feel that you are reading the "real" inside story. In his hands, terrorists are no longer caricatures of fundamentalist evil, but men whose actions seem understandable, who exist in three dimensions -- Edward Marriot * Evening Standard * Thrills in its astute entangling of East and West -- Philip Horne * Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year * A splendid adventure -- Allan Laing * Herald, Books of the Year * Foden pulls off a difficult feat - he adds something fresh to the most reported news events of the last half century -- Harry Mount * Spectator * An unusual and refreshing novel; it is willing to engage with important political issues, and does so without oversimplifying them -- William Skidelsky * Times Literary Supplement * Foden's tense, involving, well constructed book presents history as the participants might have seen it -- James Francken * London Review of Books *